creatures be the most ill-treated? But a being that should remain incomplete and unfinished, that should not attain the end which all his instincts proclaim for him, would be a monster in the eternal order,--a problem much more difficult to solve than the difficulties that have been raised against the immortality of the soul. In our opinion, this tendency of all the desires and all the powers of the soul towards the infinite, elucidated by the principle of final causes, is a serious and important confirmation of the moral proof and the metaphysical proof of another life. When we have collected all the arguments that authorize belief in another life, and when we have thus arrived at a satisfying demonstration, there remains an obstacle to be overcome. Imagination cannot contemplate without fright that unknown which is called death. The greatest philosopher in the world, says Pascal, on a plank wider than it is necessary in order to go without danger from one side of an abyss to the other, cannot think without trembling on the abyss that is beneath him. It is not reason, it is imagination that frightens him; it is also imagination that in great part causes that remnant of doubt, that trouble, that secret anxiety which the firmest faith cannot always succeed in overcoming in the presence of death. The religious man experiences this terror, but he knows whence it comes, and he surmounts it by attaching himself to the solid hopes furnished him by reason and the heart. Imagination is a child that must be educated, by putting it under the discipline and government of better faculties; it must be accustomed to go to intelligence for aid instead of troubling intelligence with its phantoms. Let us acknowledge that there is a terrible step to be taken when we meet death. Nature trembles when face to face with the unknown eternity. It is wise to present ourselves there with all our forces united,--reason and the heart lending each other mutual support, the imagination being subdued or charmed. Let us continually repeat that, in death as in life, the soul is sure to find God, and that with God all is just, all is good.[256]